By Steven Nelson
The Hollywood lawyer who paid Hunter Biden’s taxes and covers his living expenses told Congress that President Biden “always makes jokes” about his slicked-back shoulder-length hair, but deflected many pointed questions in the impeachment inquiry into alleged Biden family corruption.
Kevin Morris, 60, claimed last week in a deposition he couldn’t recall details about his purchase of the first son’s 10% stake in a Chinese state-backed investment fund — which had caused the White House headaches during Joe Biden’s first year in office — or about loans to Hunter that could top $5 million.
“The president waved and I think he said hi,” the mostly gray entertainment attorney recalled of a 2021 visit to the White House where Hunter, 53, gave him a tour.
“He always makes jokes about my hair. I think he made a crack about my hair. That was it.”
Morris, whose support of the first son includes commissioning a documentary crew to trail him for a potential reality-TV-style production, testified last week in the closed-door deposition that he instantly became Hunter’s attorney upon meeting him at a late 2019 fundraiser for Joe Biden, meaning he can’t talk about much due to attorney-client privilege.
Morris said it’s unclear yet when or how the documentary footage will be used.
“We’re doing a lot of filming of Hunter as part of the preparation, or as an asset to have in the event it is required and legal things,” Morris said. “We haven’t decided yet if we’re going to sell it as a commercial documentary.”
In his testimony, Morris gave vague confirmation of the fact that he visited the White House on three occasions, including a Fourth of July picnic last year and for the wedding of Hunter’s daughter Naomi in 2022, and that he provided Hunter Biden roughly $5 million in loans and assumed control of a Hunter Biden-owned entity that held a 10% stake in Chinese state-backed BHR Partners.
But Morris claimed he could not recall many specifics or that he couldn’t divulge them due to attorney-client privilege.
“I’ve been his counsel since the first day we met. I’ve also become his friend,” said Morris, who described how he and Hunter initially met briefly as he exited the November 2019 fundraiser.
Host Lanette Phillips reached out later to see if he’d be willing to meet with Hunter, which happened in December 2019.
Morris said that he and Hunter spoke for about five hours at Hunter’s Los Angeles home and it was “one of the most important meetings of my life” — and added, “it was my belief that Hunter was being tremendously mistreated.”
“I am not sure [of] the exact amount” he’s loaned Hunter Biden, Morris said.
“I don’t remember” the most recently tallied amount, he added — though under questioning he said it was “basically” correct that he loaned Hunter about $4.9 million between 2020 and 2022, as alleged by IRS case agent Joseph Ziegler, who worked for five years on a tax fraud case against the first son before being removed from the probe shortly after alleging a coverup to shield Joe and Hunter Biden.
Morris said that his aid to the first son amounts to “less than 10 percent” of his total assets.
He said that he’s also made payments to Hunter’s ex-wife Kathleen Buhle and to Lunden Robert, the former adult entertainer with whom Hunter shares a daughter.
Although the loans begin to come due in 2025, Morris acknowledged it’s possible he won’t be repaid — possibly requiring Hunter to wash his cars as compensation.
“As [with] any creditor…. if they’re in default under the note, yeah, the holder has an option to enforce it,” Morris said. “You could do any number of things. They can come over and wash your car for the rest of their life.”
Details of Morris’ acquisition of the Chinese state-backed investment fund BHR Partners stake remain murky. He said that he believed he bought the 10% stake — by taking over Hunter’s Skaneateles LLC — for $157,000, but that he may have also paid off a $250,000 loan by CEO Jonathan Li that was made to Hunter in 2019.
After initially testifying that his reasoning for buying the stake was “privileged,” he said, “I did the transaction because, you know, I evaluated it as a businessman, and I thought it was something that could be a very successful investment.”
A questioner asked Morris, “Would you be able to tell us after this interview when you purchased BHR?”
“Yeah,” he agreed.
“And for how much?”
Morris replied again, “Yeah.”
Some of the answers that Hunter’s so-called “sugar brother” gave were unclear or contradictory.
“Did you have a written agreement with Hunter Biden regarding the sale of Skaneateles?” an impeachment inquiry questioner asked.
“I don’t know,” Morris began. “I don’t believe so. Or — I don’t know. Probably, yeah. Probably, it was the — I would imagine I had to — okay, yeah. The answer is yes.”
When he was asked, “Does that contract allow for Hunter Biden to purchase back BHR at a certain time point?” Morris replied, “That I don’t — I can’t tell you… Meaning I don’t know.”
BHR Partners was created within 12 days of then-Vice President Joe Biden’s 2013 arrival in Beijing with Hunter, the Wall Street Journal reported. While in there, Joe Biden had coffee with incoming chief executive Li, former Hunter Biden business partner Devon Archer told Congress in July.
Joe Biden later wrote college recommendation letters for Li’s children and greeted him on speaker phone, Archer testified.
Documents from Hunter’s abandoned laptop linking his father to business relationships in countries including China and Ukraine would not be published when Hunter first met Morris, but the then-former second son’s foreign dealings had received some press attention and Morris sprang into action to pay off his tax bills.
Morris wrote to a team of accountants on Feb. 7, 2020 — about two months after meeting Hunter at the campaign fundraiser for his father — that they should expedite their work on Hunter’s tax papers to avoid “considerable risk personally and politically.”
But Morris insisted in his testimony he wasn’t thinking about the 2020 election, which Republicans say could amount to a campaign finance violation, and instead Trump’s impeachment proceedings for pressuring Ukraine to investigate the Biden family’s dealings in Ukraine, where Hunter earned a salary of up to $1 million per year to serve on the board of gas company Burisma while his father led US policy toward that country.
Trump’s Senate trial ended, however, two days before the email was sent.
